Literature Review on Photoshop® Type Effects Gone Wild

Name of Book: Photoshop® Type Effects Gone Wild

Author: Al Ward

Publisher: Wiley Publishing, Inc

Date of Publication: 2007

Summary: This book tells the reader the various Photoshop techniques that could be used to gain a potential customer’s interest in the product or simply to make an image or idea much more appealing and interesting visually. It focuses especially on textual imagery and typography that are used in various contexts, and offers useful tutorials on how to create them and to put them to good use. The book consists of six different parts, and each part address a varying purpose for Photoshop imaging. The parts are alphabet soup, which addresses commercial advertising, home sweet home, which addresses imagery in books, or book cover-type treatments, planet media, which addresses the media genre from newspaper to the news channel, beyond these four walls, which addresses the Photoshop imagery that you see outside your home and around the neighbourhood, leisure time, which focuses on leisure time and delves into the typography that we find in that area, and lastly movies gone wild, which addresses the techniques used to create posters and media for movies and the such.

All these parts also have different sub-parts which are mainly examples of the typography found under that section and also give an in-depth and very detailed tutorial on how to go about making it. The tutorials are given in a step-by-step format and even gives technical information that are to be taken note of in the execution of the text ion Photoshop, such as the font, font size, and even the vertical and horizontal scale of the text. They also show pictures of each step that is done in Photoshop and also show and example of the end product after the completion of all the steps.

Review: I think that this book is very relevant and useful for our research and the execution of our project as it provides really useful and meaningful information that could help us when we are thinking of designing a poster for our project. Poster design is really relevant to our project as we could use it as a means to gain awareness for the public as well as our schoolmates regarding our project initiative as well as the plight that our beneficiaries are facing. We could also use it to advertise our cause so that we could get sponsors and partners that are willing to help us in our project and give us both material and moral support that we really need. Using posters to fulfill all these objectives will be very beneficial as visual imagery really helps to capture attention and also helps to convey the message much more effectively. This might sound clichéd, but a photo does tell us much more than words do.

However, all the information in the book is relevant to our case and only very little parts here and there could really be put to good use for our cause. Also, not all the techniques have the desired results that we want and are not even that visually appealing. However, the ones that are good enough for us are really the effective ones that we are looking for and furthermore, the tutorials that are provided are really clear and detailed and hence are very easy to execute. Thus, this book is a good read for our group.